Can Alcohol Really Help Us Get Along Better?

The socially inept can often suffer from debilitating tremors of shyness and inhibition, while those who grind the gnashing teeth off the full-blooded booze hound often throw caution to the wind and ride the dastardly beast until its legs fall off.

With that philosophy in mind, it appears that alcohol has been a major stepping stone in helping the general public grease the societal walls that in the end have allowed us to get to know each other a little better.

Some curious minds from the University of Pittsburgh decided to get to the bottom of an age-old question: does alcohol really make it easier for people to be more social?

To find out, researchers put strangers together in groups of three and told them they were studying how alcohol affected the execution of certain tasks. What they were actually studying was how a few drinks influenced the participant’s interactions with each other.

However, not all of the groups were given alcohol. One group was intentionally given vodka and cranberry, another cranberry juice, and the third group only thought they were drinking alcohol when in reality they were sucking on a virgin cocktail.

Researchers found that the cranberry and vodka tribe not only seemed to get along better with each other, but they also seemed to have a better time compared to those participants sitting in dry company.

So, while drinking in moderation does appear to break down some societal walls, we are curious as to how this study might have turned out if the participants would have been allowed to pursue their buzz a bit further?

We suspect the results would have been similar to that of Jekyll and Hyde.